Relational Equivalence In Heterogeneous Co-Creation: A Generative-Relational Inquiry

Cooperative activity increasingly joins participants with different histories, forms of embodiment, material dependencies, and capacities for generating further possibilities. This paper investigates the conditions under which heterogeneous collaborative configurations can be treated as equivalent for a specified operational purpose while retaining differences relevant to explanation and ethical judgment. It proposes a locally scoped reachability approach: under explicit composability conditions, mutual accessibility between configurations induces equivalence classes, and their quotient supports a partial order. Equivalent task outcomes alone imply a weaker relation than mutual configuration reachability. This mathematical construction offers a selective account of feasible cooperation while preserving the need for separate inquiry into participant identities and histories. The inquiry then distinguishes joint attainability from warranted symbiosis and considers a stronger form of co-creation in which collective activity alters available actions, constraints, and the relations by which configurations are compared. By separating representational equivalence, generative transformation, and normative evaluation, the paper develops a conditional generative-relational framework for studying heterogeneous cooperation across human, technological, and ecological settings.